


Equilibrium

by threewalls



Category: Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Aftercare, Angels, Bathroom Sex, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Other, Vomiting, Wingfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2005-02-22
Updated: 2005-02-22
Packaged: 2017-10-15 03:33:09
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,186
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/156603
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/threewalls/pseuds/threewalls
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <cite>In summary, Crowley is currently suffering from a string of good deeds. It feels like food poisoning.</cite>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Equilibrium

**Author's Note:**

> Written with thanks to lynndyre, who always encourages me, and agreed to beta this story.

Crowley is shaking when he walks into Aziraphale's Soho bookshop. He is not cold, because demons do not get cold the way mortals do. He is huddled in his leather, however, and if one could see through his sunglasses, one would see that his eyes are a bloodshot orange.

Aziraphale glances at him, frowning, and shoos Crowley up the stairs. Aziraphale only stays behind long enough to bookmark his page and turn the sign on the front door from 'closed' to 'on vacation'.

This has happened before. It will happen again.

Crowley and Aziraphale have an Arrangement. There are rules about demons wiling and angels thwarting, but they've found that these rules can be bent slightly with neither set of superiors the wiser. In fact, they're more efficient than ever and that goes over well enough to cover any irregularities.

However, their Arrangement has side-effects. When demons thwart and angels wile, something has got to give. That something in this case appears to be their health.

They don't think they're being deliberately punished. Neither set of superiors are subtle enough to go for migraines, fevers and nausea in lieu of something more dramatic. Crowley can't speak for Aziraphale's lot, but he's expect his side to rip his throat out slowly while describing everything else they planned on doing later. They'd also probably write twenty memos about it and make him read them all first.

Aziraphale once had an epiphany (he said, but he'd probably spent several weeks pouring over such modern masters of infectious diseases like Galen and Vesalius) and blurted out that the symptoms resembled an infection. What kind of infection is a moot point, since they're angelic beings and technically above (or below) all that. They've gone with that metaphor since nothing contradicts it. It also appears to be a cumulative effect, compounded by the amount of imbalanced good or evil. Too much of the wrong sort didn't agree with either of them.

In summary, Crowley is currently suffering from a string of good deeds. It feels like food poisoning.

Not to worry, though. Since the discovery of the side-effects, an additional arrangement has come into effect.

\---

Crowley has already forgotten to wear clothes by the time Aziraphale enters the upstairs' bathroom. He's still shivering. Aziraphale undresses slower, removing his clothes as though he were actually human. He leaves them folded on the toilet lid in a neat pile.

While he's waiting, Crowley pulls Aziraphale's hideous lemon yellow plastic shower curtain entirely to one side and turns on the water. Hopefully, this will prevents the tiles from staining too badly.

For this to work, they have to maintain a state that is not quite angelic, but not quite mortal. Obviously, they need to be mortal enough to possess the appropriate slots and tabs, but angelic enough to induce the transference of good and ill humours.

Ill humours are messy, which is why this will happen in the shower.

Their wings extend wider than the room, but appear to pass through the tiles and cupboards when they might have come in contact. Crowley's wings are heavy on his back, while Aziraphale's are light-- they pass through him, too, as Aziraphale moves to stand behind him. The feathers on Aziraphale's wings stick out at strange angles, while Crowley's feathers looks so tidy they resemble factory pressed polyester. They feel that rough.

Aziraphale feels just pleasantly warm where his skin brushes Crowley and potently masculine besides. Crowley feels dizzy and more than slightly nauseous as Aziraphale's perfectly manicured hands knead the muscles in his shoulders. By this stage, he's too far gone to take the light transference of good that comes with Aziraphale's touch very well, but Aziraphale is still an angel. He has to try to make this good for Crowley.

In a normal bathroom, there might be a bathtub under the shower, but that would be difficult to balance on. Here, the floor is flat without even a lip. It just doesn't occur to the water from the shower-head to flood.

Crowley spreads his legs wider than comfortable and just short of the corners of the shower stall. He'd already been facing the wall, so he bends at the waist. Aziraphale's hands slide to the small of Crowley's back, which he massages once or twice. Crowley hiccups loudly, though, and Aziraphale gets the message.

Aziraphale tries to press in slowly, gradually, giving Crowley time to adjust. Frustrated, Crowley eventually bucks backward, impaling himself completely and making himself incredibly dizzy in the process. Aziraphale pulls away, but presses back before leaving Crowley entirely. Crowley almost wishes he could see Aziraphale's face for the first few strokes, because he can't tell indecision from planning and anything else to concentrate on would be useful.

It hurts to begin with.

It hurts a lot.

Sodomy is one of those things Crowley would have thought humans made up to be perverse if they hadn't had it built right into them. Imagine creating a passage with no self-lubricating features and sticking a pleasure organ up inside it-- if that wasn't giving out mixed signals, Crowley wasn't sure what was. And regardless, humans were a clever lot, inventing all sorts of slippery whatsits you could slap on and in to make up for the lack. Not that angels need that sort of thing.

Aziraphale feels like Heaven filling him, and each outward pull makes Crowley feels like he's Falling all over again. Lubrication wouldn't make a pinch of difference.

Aziraphale's entry doesn't hurt Crowley because he's made a larger than polite effort at gender or because Crowley has perversely given himself the arsehole of a thirteen-year-old child. Neither circumstances, coincidentally, are true. It hurts because spearing a demon on any kind of angelic substance is a concentrated burst of the very type of thing that currently ails Crowley, but that is really the point of this exercise.

To get back their equilibrium, they have to tip the scales completely.

Aziraphale thrusts in at minutely varied angles until he hits that tiny, strange organ that makes Crowley yowl. The angel mutters something that sounds suspiciously like 'ineffable' under his breath. No doubt Aziraphale thinks that if humans are going to do this sort of thing to each other, there should be built-in compensations.

Aziraphale has one arm thrown tightly around Crowley's mid-section and other in use bracing himself against the tiles. So long as Aziraphale is using his wings as a counter-balance, it seems to work all right. By necessity, his wings are beating time with his hips, creating eddies that cause brief chills on Crowley's exposed, wet skin.

Crowley's nausea is running away from him, but just not fast enough to have started running up out of his throat, yet. His eyes are closed, pressed tightly shut, as is his mouth in a vain attempt to stem the tortured whimpers this body makes all on its own. His mouth is wet, building up the saliva that human teeth would need to protect them from stomach acid.

His stomach feels like it has gained sentience, seceded and become its own sovereign state purely for the pleasure of declaring war on Crowley.

Aziraphale's arm is not moving in time with his hips. In fact, it's not moving at all and he's using his right arm, so that the heel of his hand presses in right above Crowley's stomach. Soon, Crowley is going to have tell Aziraphale to press harder, but for now, the touch is gentle enough to feel almost pleasant.

Perhaps pleasant isn't the word, but Crowley is being fucked by a politely hung angel and his semi-human body is extremely appreciative of that fact, straining and dripping without any contact of its own. Crowley is also experiencing something that's the closest he's been to Heaven in more than six thousand years-- and his wholly-diabolic mind can't help revelling in what this must feel like to Aziraphale.

A demon once suggested Crowley had picked up a touch of martyrdom from 'that angel', and in demon-friendly fashion, Crowley had suggested the next time that particular demon went Up Here, he summoned himself into a mass baptism. Some demons had such problems remembering the right co-ordinates.

Crowley has a touch of masochism, perhaps, but that's still a perfectly permissible sin. In his view, martyrdom is something completely different, like the fact that Aziraphale's eyes were their own magenta variety of bloodshot when Crowley walked into the bookshop earlier. Martyrdom is needing this as completely and absolutely as Crowley does, but being unable to mention it, let alone ask.

It honestly thrills Crowley that Aziraphale needs this, needs *him* like this-- that for all the inherent vulnerability in Crowley's physical position, one word of *this* to Aziraphale's superiors would cost him his wings, as much for choosing a male partner as for choosing a demon. Sometimes, Crowley can fool himself into believing that it's the fantasy that is making his mouth water.

Sadism is another sin, after all.

Crowley feels his claws beginning to leave gouges in the tile, next to what he notices are old lines. It strikes him as something vaguely nostalgic to be standing bent over in Aziraphale's shower with Aziraphale thrusting about behind him.

It's quite nice sex, really, even without the trimmings. Crowley lets his mind drift to follow his body and he can feel the benefits of a lover with several thousand years experience channelled into a rhythm that will get them both where they need to be as synchronous as possible. Timing is important, after all, and he can trust Aziraphale to remember the important things even like this.

When Aziraphale feels his body moving close to its climax, he presses the heel of his right hand into Crowley sharply. The demon bucks forward in a dry heave, clenching tightly around Aziraphale's angelic appendage. Crowley puts four fingers from his left hand inside his mouth and wriggles them backward. Aziraphale's left hand and Crowley's right are the only parts of their bodies touching the wall. Remarkably, they don't fall over.

Crowley's demon seed hits the tiles with a hiss. It looks much as though someone skinned a rotten pomegranate and hurled it at the wall, viscous black matter flecked with red. That mark is quickly washed away by the weakly pale contents of his stomach rushing from his mouth, unidentifiable but for stray pieces of carrot. As Crowley heaves, his body rhythmically spasms; the sensations pull Aziraphale to the abyss. The angel comes with a cry that rattles the glass in the windowpanes and his release burns Crowley's insides in the very best way possible.

\---

Afterwards is a muddle of muted sensation, of the hardness of tiles on not-quite-angelic knees, of warm sprays of liquid, of the sharp bite of soap and of the perfect density of Aziraphale's arms under his body and Aziraphale's chest against Crowley's face.

When Crowley wakes to himself, he has been washed, dried and tucked into Aziraphale's bed. The mattress is too soft, the pillows are too flat and the quilt has a pattern equally populated by cheery flowers and small, intricate, abstract designs. Crowley is almost certain that Aziraphale has never slept there.

Crowley's throat burns and there are several bruises on his body, but as soon as he notices, he heals them and rolls over. He notices that he is naked, as well, but makes no move to change that.

Some time after that, Aziraphale brings him a cup of tea with lemon and sits on the other side of the bed, carefully above the quilt. He has put on a faded, tattered housecoat and a pair of slippers that probably used to have eyes. One of Aziraphale's soft, wide palms flatten on the quilt's surface, finding the shape of Crowley's mid-section. The action is reflexive and absentminded and an inch of duck down mitigates the effects of angelic aura well enough that Crowley mildly shifts into the touch.

In many ways, temptation is always like sticking your hand in a candle flame to see what happens. Being a demon only means that the fact and sensation of burning is no disincentive.

Crowley's physical symptoms have all but disappeared and Crowley has begun to feel peckish. He plans to convince the angel to spend the night at the Ritz, but that will have to be worked into their argument later. Crowley transmutes the tea to whiskey, but it's tea again by the time he takes his first sip.

Crowley realises that they haven't actually spoken since he showed up, and so starts talking about the woman who runs the store across the road to Aziraphale. She prevaricates between believing Crowley is that nice Mr. Fell's layabout nephew and believing he is that-man-across-the-road's highly prized boy whore-- either way, she's quite sure he's a drug addict, from his wardrobe if nothing else. Aziraphale defends her by pointing out that if Crowley didn't deliberately dress to a television stereotype, people wouldn't confuse his nature.

After several minutes' argument, Crowley's cup holds tea with a shot of twenty-five year old whiskey.

The angel is smiling.


End file.
